Petersen Sails to Shutter Island

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Perfect Storm director returns to Massachusetts.

By Stax

According to The Boston Herald, Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm) has agreed to direct the big-screen version of author Dennis Lehane's soon-to be-published novel, Shutter Island, for Columbia Pictures. Lehane, a Boston native, advised the paper that Columbia has snapped up the screen rights to his book and have approached Petersen to helm it. "I loved Das Boot and In the Line of Fire. (Petersen's) one of those old-time craftsmen types," Lehane advised the Herald. "So when (Columbia) told me he was interested, I was really happy. We spoke on the phone for about half-an-hour and afterwards I said, 'Let's go with this guy.'"

Shutter Island will be released in book stores April 15. The paper claims it's "set in an institution for the criminally insane on one of Boston's harbor islands." Lehane says the plot revolves around "two U. S. marshals [who] go out there to search for a missing patient and begin to fear that they won't be allowed to return to the mainland."

Lehane's official site provides a more detailed synopsis and says the story is set during the summer of 1954: "U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them. But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. And neither is Teddy Daniels. Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe's radical approach to psychiatry? ... Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?"

The author made it clear that he won't be penning the screenplay adaptation. "Some guys can do it, I can't," Lehane said. "I think I'm too close to the material." He adds that its uncertain whether or not Shutter Island would film in Boston as the asylum and island settings could be shot anywhere.

Warners, incidentally, will release the big-screen version of Lehane's Mystic River this fall. That film's cast features prominent anti-war activists Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Laurence Fishburne. When asked whether or not he fears that some will boycott Mystic River because of its cast, Lehane said, "I'll definitely have a no comment on that."